Posts Tagged ‘stress relief’

I want to add some explanations so you can understand what I mean by it.

Following in our journey in learning about the Survival Code I last mentioned the Physical Defense and the implications it has for our experience in life. Now I will expand on my opinions on the Emotional Defense Response and hope this expands your awareness of emotions and what you can and can’t do with them.

The most important term to understand regarding your emotional reactions is ‘Suppression’. More than any other area of life, suppression of emotional expression is the most dangerous. Why? The reasons are pretty clear.

The energy we use to keep emotions suppressed is enormous. We just cannot keep suppressing the emotions indefinitely because we just don’t have that much energy.

The suppression of emotions and the resultant energy drain takes energy away from basic necessary life functions. Yes, the things that keep us alive have to keep going. No energy = no quality which leads to dysfunction and eventually, to no function.

So what your subconscious does is try to express your emotions that may have been suppressed (or you believe others have suppressed in you) via different emotions. It is so common for a person to believe they are angry (which is socially unacceptable) while actually they may be feeling frustrated or resentful or impatient, and the list goes on.

Your subconscious is aware when you suppress emotions because it has to adjust to the energy change. But it still has the job of expressing the emotional energy.

Why do we have to express emotions?

Firstly the expression helps us to better identify our relationships with other people. Suppress the emotions and those relationships become at best unclear and at worst a lie.

Secondly, the unexpressed emotions go back down into our bodies and create what the Chinese would call, ‘Perverse Chi’ which damages organ function and recuperation if it continues long enough.

Eventually this compensated emotional pattern can damage your heart and your ‘Shen’.

This is where we see mental anomalies occur and people start thinking wrongly. There is plenty of insanity in society and most of that comes from the effect of suppressed emotions.

You keep your values moving and growing as long as you keep expressing your values.

What does all this have to do with Emotional Defense Responses?

When you feel threatened it is not just at a physical level. You can be even more motivated by emotional abuse than physical. So you learn to use a select group of emotions to ‘protect’ the real you. Eventually you may even forget what the ‘real you’ is like because of all the attention we put onto those ‘other’ emotions.

Emotions are like a language, we speak in a certain language to define who we are at any given time but in a way that reflects the values we live by.

How many emotions are there?

12, 50 147? Maybe more or less but there are actually only about 6 emotions that any one person will always come back to. These are controlled and initiated by the Amygdala in the brain. Don’t worry, that’s its job. You don’t have to know what or where it is, just to know that there is a place in the brain devoted to regulating these primary emotions.

So if we are really only basing our emotional life on 6 emotions, then why do we feel all the other emotions at different times?

This is the smoke screen we have developed to hide our real emotions from attack or scrutiny from others.

Does that mean that most of what we feel is not true? The answer is yes.

The emotions we feel most of the time are a smoke screen to hide the real ones. We spend so much time practicing fake emotions that we forget what the real ones are.

We need to change the fake ones to get to the real ones and express them. This is why you can ask yourself this question when you are feeling emotional about something or someone: “What did I feel before I felt ………?”

Then ask the same question of the answer and repeat this until you can’t go any further. You have probably found a primal emotion. Now you are at the point of expressing that emotion in the best possible way.

But wait, why would you have to ask yourself to find the deepest emotion?

Well, because we learn how to cover up emotions and use the superficial ones as defences for the deeper ones. So associated to all those emotions are strategies to avoid and deny the real ones.

To change the strategies as well as the emotional responses you will need to get the Stress Relief Strategies Revealed book and use the techniques I have written there. These will not only get your brain to change to better responses but do it by choice rather than by defense.

I know, you want to know what the 6 core emotions are, don’t you?

Before I tell you that, there is something I want to say about fear. Fear is considered an emotion. This is not completely true. Fear is actually a mixture of emotions and mental patterns of survival. It cannot be truly described solely as an emotion. A large component of fear is the perception that is being maintained which is a mental function not an emotional function.

It is true that fear is one of the responses controlled by the Amygdala, but that’s because the amygdala regulates the survival responses along with other parts of the brain. It does not just regulate emotions, although most of what it does in emotional.

OK the emotions are as follows:

Fear. As I already mentioned is not purely an emotion, try False Evidence Appearing Real.

Guilt.A powerful motivator to not do something.

Rejection.Leads to lack of safety.

Rage.Uncontrollable anger.

Grief/AbandonedDeepest sorrow.

Hate.The active repulsion of love.

Emotional defense is the second of The 4 Main Defenses. The next article will be on the most damaging of these four, the Mental Defense. Until then, enjoy.

This Survival Code articles are all related to ADD and are to inform you of a most important neurological substrate that can ruin your life or make it what you want.

These articles are to give you a full rounded picture of what the Survival Code means to you and what you can do about it.

The focus of this article is to describe better the effects of the Survival Code when it is activated.

Firstly if you have not read any previous articles in this line, I wish to explain a few things.

I am talking about the fusion of your genetic information that makes us who we are with your learned experiences that mould the nervous system into what it is today. This becomes the reference for our subconscious to recognise anything that could possibly hurt or threaten us.

We then do an interesting thing. We go into a primitive response (reaction really) called the Flight –Fight response. Now this would be fine if we were fighting off dinosaurs or ferocious beasts but these days our dinosaurs are bills or the rising prices of food etc.

If we cannot burn off the stress hormones produced by the Fight-Flight response it damages the immune system and associates an abnormal reaction to whatever we are focussing on at the time. If what we are focussed on isfoodand we have too many stress hormones in the blood stream we will develop a stress reaction to that food.This is called allergies.

If we are attempting to learn something new and the stress hormones are excessive we develop a stress reaction to the process of learning, this is called dyslexia.

I could continue with this list but it’s not the point of this article. The point is, while we are reacting to perceived threats that we cannot resolve in a natural, neurologically sound way, we develop dysfunction by association.

You may have heard the term, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” This refers to the process of association the nervous system uses to ‘Know’ something. It attaches one neurological event to another event and they become linked together. Perhaps forever, if the events are repeated often enough.

We respond to our own stress.

Yes, that’s right. We respond to our own stress reactions and will learn to do one of two things:

1.We will succumb to the association of the two new events and live them out in our lives.

(Usually because we are not aware of their existence).

2.We will learn to overcome the effects of this unholy alliance by developing skills to change their influence. (Still unaware yet subconsciously driven to develop these skills).

Let’s look at the first scenario.

This is easy to assess because it is purely what most people would call “Stress”. As in previous articles the word “Stress” is the wrong term. Actually we should be using the term ‘Challenge’ for the ‘thing’ stressing us. This starts out as an external stimulus but can develop into an internal response once turned into a habitual response. The term we should use for the reaction to the Challenge is “Distress”. This is our reaction to the ‘stress’ not something outside us that is doing damage.

It is this ‘Distress’ that causes all the harm.

If life was simple, we could finish this article here by saying, “If you could only short-cut the Distress Reaction, you could change your life!” And that would be true!

Life is far from simple, yet there are simple laws that govern what we do as humans. The laws that govern our neurological responses, which in turn govern how we learn, are clear and unchanging.

They say, that if you associate two opposing forces, the stronger force will eventually win in the neurological decision making process. In other words, the associations we practice become the stronger behaviours within us.

If we practice going into the ‘fight-flight response’, it will become a habit and then a major character trait that has pre-eminence in our behaviours.

Opposing forces create conflict when put together.

We see this conflict range from simple confusion and forgetfulness to violence, murder and even war.

Yes these would be stressful events but they are obvious. What’s not so obvious are the skills we learn and develop to overcome the ‘stresses. They are more subtle and not always recognised in the right context. They are the ‘Compensations” to unresolved stress reactions.

These compensations are indeed skills and are developed out of a need to survive. They are based on inherited qualities that our ancestors used and developed in their time, but not by choice.

If we dig deep into the construction of these ‘Compensations/Skills’ we find some interesting qualities.

I will use the example of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). This is not a disorder, it is a result of a series of compensations to unresolved stress reactions.

There are three symptoms the medical model uses to define ADD.

1These people are easily distracted. Their attention is easily redirected and they find it difficult to finish any given task. They are starters but rarely finish anything.

2They are highly impulsive, which means they give little if any warning of change.
This is quite disturbing for those around them.

3They are classed as hyperactive. Too much energy that is seemingly out of control.

Unfortunately for these people their compensations take them into an inability to direct their neurological activities and therefore their behaviour reflects this multi-directionalism.

The skills the ADD person has developed, are all activities that are needed at the time of early growth to organise neurological input. Something happened to these people at a crucial time of change in their neurological development that changed the direction of that development.

They went into a distress state and it became associated with the most dominant activities at the time. These were, Curiosity and the need to change focus quickly (Distractible), Creating new options based on the events at hand (Impulsive) and finally the ability to Change the direction of their Energy (Hyperactive?).

I, for one, would love to have more Curiosity, Creativity and Energy, wouldn’t you?

Anyway the point again is that while people like this have the Distress State associated with other functions, these functions are going to be disturbed.

There are two directions available for anyone who has this kind of association happening.

1They can learn to suppress the compensations with drugs or other forms of therapy.

2Or, they can train their nervous system to use the talents they have and turn them into skills to rewire the associations and remove the conflict.

The second option would give them a much greater chance of redirecting their attention to the things that would help them organize internally.

OK. How do we train the nervous system to give up on its existing associations?

YOU CAN’T!

What you can do is use the very same process the subconscious used in the first place to make the ‘Unholy’ alliances and turn them into usable assets. That’s right! The fact that they are there in the first place means we can find them easily. They are typically stress reactions and easy to identify.

Once we find these nasty associations we can then retrain the nervous system to ADD (pardon the pun) new and better alternatives to what is there.

Luckily there is another law that governs the subconscious responses, which is, it will always do the best it can for you with what it has. Before we start this process it has little more than some wrong associations. After the training it will have the same wrong associations but with new additions to them.

There are always better alternatives to what exists within the associations already in your brain and nervous system. Once the better options have been experienced they can be used to reassociate with the existing ones and create new neurological pathways.

Then we have the talents we created to overcome the associations but now in a usable form.

I spoke last time about the Survival Code, a mixture of your genetic preferences inherited from your parents and beyond and the learned responses from life experiences.

I want to expose some of the neurological events that make this important for you to know about.

When you were born your nervous system was nowhere near finished in its development. In fact of all the mammals on the planet, neurologically, humans are born about 16-18 months too early. But there is a real reason for this.

Human neurology places much more attention on the experiential side of neurological training than does other animal neurology. You use life experience as a way of learning how to survive in the long term. Animals on the other hand put more emphasis on immediate survival. So they walk within minutes of being born because they don’t need to learn anything new about walking.

You might say that about humans too except that humans use the neurology of walking for many more things than just walking and you become so nimble in your ability to move that you can do things with your body that animals cannot. (And they probably would not want to either)

Our neurological functions learn to be more integrated and intricate than any other on the planet.

Let’s look quickly at the process you evolve through after birth.

At birth you have two hemispheres in the brain that are wired to function in a certain genetically preferred way. But if for some reason your brain cannot use the two hemispheres it will learn to use just one. Take for example the women born with only one half of her brain. She can function very normally, though with some challenges because some functions the right brain has taken over from the left (which was not there).

In other words, what functions would have been devoted to her left brain were transferred to the right side because she had no left brain.

Be that what it may, it shows that the brain and nervous system can adapt to some of the most severe circumstances. The earlier we experience the difficulties, the earlier the brain and nervous system learn to adapt and change to meet the new circumstances. If this was done according to genetic expectations many people would die early in life.

Your nervous system can and does adapt more from learning about its environment than what it is told ‘should be’ from its genetic references.

From the first breath you take your right brain is developing faster than the left. It has the job of spatial and form recognition. It hears sounds via tonal differences rather than specific words. It recognises actions and movements and decides on the response required because of the input it receives.

It has to be the first hemisphere to advance because it’s set of characteristics help you to develop the neural processes that support your growth. You start life from a sense of generality and progress towards specification as you have more experiences that reinforce your world’s preferences.

Your right brain is a great ‘impressionist’. It recognises life as a series of impressions and also sets up the neurology to reproduce those impressions as actions or abilities later on.

Your right brain tends to accept everything without much concern for whether it is right or wrong.
At this early stage you, the child, have little idea of the definitions of self (or the world) until the left hemisphere starts its development stage after 3 years old.

Any impressions experienced by ‘the child’ from birth to 3 years old become major references for what to expect from life. Therefore anything that occurs in this time are used as memories but are not defined as we think of memories. They are impressions that are real but non-descript.

This is one of the most important jobs psychology has, to put into words the impressions that formed our nervous system and brain before 3 years old, before we had an understanding of how words can represent these early impressions.

How does this relate to ‘Facts of Life’?

These early impressions are the basis of who you think you are in the world. Your subconscious knows who you are from going through the experience of being born but has not worked out who you are in the world until it gets more feedback from that world.

Here is where things start to heat up!

If the experiences you have early in life are all in support of your natural growth, your nervous system will develop into a stable and open learning system. If the experiences are not so supportive you develop a sense of threat which activates the genetic based response called survival.

How this happens is from the reaction we call ‘stress’. Stress is really a bad name for what is really happening though. Your stress reaction is a built in neurological response to threat, i e., something that could kill you. The stress reaction is really your reaction to something you perceive could kill you. Even if it can’t actually kill you.

Your nervous system needs certain training to complete its development!

There are some specific needs your nervous system has in this early stage, one of which is direct interaction with the mother. If this is denied, you, as the child, can quickly become desperate and die from distress.

Dr. Nil Bergman from South Africa with his ‘Kangaroo Child Care System’ has shown very succinctly that the child who is separated early from the mother will grow into an adult with very predictable and serious social and neurological defects.

Your nervous system is growing at the fastest rate in your life and any event that threatens you during this period impresses on your nervous system very quickly and sometimes permanently. They become the ‘Facts of Your Life’ which your subconscious uses to know what is threatening and what is not.

This is what makes up the ‘Survival Code’.

The more threatening events you experience and the earlier you experience them, the greater number of ‘Facts of life’ you have and use to justify your survival responses.

Your ‘Facts’ could be anything that opposes your natural neurological development. The consequence of these threatening events is to teach your nervous system that it needs to survive, so it makes the ‘Survival Code’.

What are the ‘Facts’ your subconscious uses to keep your Survival Code active?

How is this directing you away from the experiences you want to have in life?
I will be able to help you find them by training the nervous system with what it needs that it never had.

In the next article I continue to go deeper into the effects your life facts have on you and how you live your life.

To your continued health and happiness.

Andrew Verity

PS Keep watching for the Stress Relief Strategies Revealed book from Neuro-Training

How you can crack your Survival Code and save yourself a life of wasted time, energy and stress.

Most of your time is taken up consciously with everyday things which must get done. You are distracted constantly away from those things you are good at and the things that would change your life into the success you want it to be.

You are overrun with conscious input, most of which you’ll try to block out anyway. So your subconscious has the job of collecting all the other stuff you don’t want to know about consciously and process it into some usable form.

To do this your subconscious categorizes all the input you experience (even if you are not consciously aware of it) and attempts to use it where it can and store it where it can’t. It can be acting on information you are not consciously aware of. In fact, it does this most of the time.

The more you use the subconscious this way the more you invite its other activities to become stronger as well. You mostly do not know what they are either so; how much of your life is the way you consciously want it to be?

Pay attention! This is critical information for you to understand your life!!

There are some things you have to know about your subconscious!

·The subconscious runs most of what you do

·It pays close attention to what your genes are telling it

·It must survive and reproduce

·It always does the best it can to help you be better

·It can only use what it has, not what you wish it had

·If you don’t tell it what you want in the way it understands it will use what it has

·It is literal and tries to make everything simple

·It will take action before you even know there is a problem

The most important of these for our discussion now is that the subconscious must survive,because it wants you to survive. You die, it dies.

For it to survive it has created what I call a‘Survival Code’.

This is a mixture of genetic references and the learned behaviors you develop through your life events and experiences.

I can hear you say, “It’s good to survive isn’t it?”

And the answer is: “You have already survived! You can stop doing that now and do what your survival was preparing you for – Living!!!”

Too much of your life is spent on surviving at a subconscious level while life and the things you want slip away from you, without even noticing till it’s too late.

The Survival Code is like having two full-time jobs.

One is to survive and mobilize all the resources needed to make that survival successful, while at the same time you have a life to lead with its own demands and pressures. If you had two full-time jobs, you would be dead in a week. Yet in fact, we all have two jobs to do and some people will tell you they feel they have more than two.

The big challenge is that while we are doing survival, we cannot do many other things. The resources you use up doing survival are no longer available for the things you want in life.

Why is it a Code?

The subconscious has formed a ‘recipe’ of all the main components of the events that were threatening to you at some time in life. The more threatening the event, the more components of that event get put into your library of “Survival Facts”.

You have different ‘Facts’ you use to know when you are under threat. The problem is, you don’t know consciously which are survival facts and which are just memories. You could start remembering some event and end up getting really stressed from just remembering a threatening event. The event is not here and now but your subconscious starts to react to it as if it was real and now.

Your resources are mobilized to survive the threat via a genetic based reaction called theFight-Flight-Faint response. This is how you survive based on your own experience.
The command to survive is a standing (ongoing) order from the genes.

While you are doing Flight-Fight-Faint response you are preoccupied and cannot put 100% attention to what you want to be doing.

The Survival Code guarantees you will focus on survival regardless of anything else you are doing or want to do. Even this by itself is still something you can overcome, but when you make this genetic based survival response a Habit, you lose the game!

Everyone has a different code but they are all built the same way by the genes. The genetic information is at the base of the code so you need to rewrite the code in a way the subconscious thinks comes from the genes. We have some cools ways to do that.

It is a mixture of a genetic based reaction to threat and the information you have accumulated over time to build up your ‘Facts’ of survival.

Crack the code and you set yourself free.

You rewrite the code by changing your neurological reactions to stress while consciously directing your attention to ‘Changing the Facts’.

One of the assumptions you make about any fact,
is that that are real and unchangeable.

That, in neurological terms, is untrue. You can replace or associate new Facts with any life experience. It then becomes crucial for the change process to be accepted, that the way you make the new associations must be recognizable by the subconscious as a valid genetic process. You can do just that and I will show you how in this book.

The Facts are usually life events that you did not like or that were not good for your natural development. When a young baby is taken away from its mother, it will become more and more distressed until something tells it “You could die”. The response will become stronger over time and the code becomes stronger.

Meet your best friend - Your Nervous System.

Your Nervous System has connections to every part of who you are and can respond to any stimulus. It constantly monitors changes and is connected to systems that can be used to read those changes.

It can be used as a feedback tool to know when you are heading in the right direction with the change process and indicate when a change of action is needed. It’s like having a spy inside the subconscious that will tell information if you push the right button.

Using the Nervous System to monitor cracking the Survival Code, we have to also look at the Brain.The brain is a mixture of Nervous System, Mind and Genetics all in one integrated package.

If someone gave you one hundred million neurons and said, “Here, go design a Brain.”

What would you do? You certainly could not reproduce what you use now and even scientists who make it their job to know how it works, still don’t understand everything it can do.But the subconscious does!

The brain is made of various divisions that seem to compete for the ‘user rights’ to lots of different types of information. It is alive and not unlike a muscle, in that if you don’t use it, some of its functions are sacrificed so the activity you are practicing can become better.

The two sides of the brain have learned to develop certain functions different to each other. They attempt to coordinate as much as possible but when the Survival Code is activated only the left hemisphere initiates actions. Some parts of the brain are activated to help the survival take place while other parts are inhibited, either so they can’t interfere or it is not economical to have them running when survival seems more important.

There is a very specific action the brain takes when the Survival Code is activated. It firstly slows done your ‘Corpus Callosum’, the connecting bridge between the two hemispheres by changing the chemistry of the area. Secondly it shuts down other ‘unwanted’ activities and thirdly it preserves energy for the survival rather than thinking of planning.

Let’s face it. If you are about to be eaten by a dinosaur you don’t need the part required for future planning to take over and create a conversation with the animal to convince it that “maybe eating you isn’t such a good idea in the long term”.

A lot of blood is mobilized into the muscles of your body to fight or flight, while some parts of the brain remain empty other parts are needed to control the fight flight process.

Even though this is an ancient survival action it has been evolved to be the most efficient. So when you see the dinosaur you immediately activate your Survival Code which sets in place a series of neurological events that try to keep you alive.

Well it’s pretty easy to see how surviving a dinosaur could be necessary, but what about all the other things you need to survive?. Some are inherited because of the nature of the evolution of the survival mechanism, but most are collected experiences that you have been through and that your nervous system has learned about.

These learned ‘FACTS’ are stored in your ‘Survival Code’ and used to alert the Fight-Flight mechanism to activate. The code is unique to each individual and yet uses the same genetic responses to act out its primary need – survival.

What if there is a ‘Fact’ in your code that says “TAXATION”. Then anything you associate with taxation can start up the Survival Code and your subconscious immediately goes into survival mode. The dinosaur you could run from or fight but what do you do with a letter from the taxation dept. Do you fight it? Run from it? Pretend it’s not there (the modern version of ‘faint’). None of these options make the threat go away.

So now you have a survival mechanism in action but no way for it to be effective. Therefore less chance to turn it off again. Usually the survival mechanism will reset after a good fight or run and the hormones and blood changes that take place during the survival activity are put back ready to survive the next threat.

It could be worse!

Another thing to consider is that if the mechanism is not reset, it becomes a constant action that is never turned off. This means that you are on alert all the time for ANYTHING that may be associated with any type of threat.

Now the subconscious is constantly looking for what the threat may be because its Survival Code is still activated.Anything can now become the focus of the survival response. The effect of this is commonly seen as ‘stress’. Even just asking someone how they are today out of courtesy, may be met with an angry response.

Stress reactions are a signal that the Survival Code is active and needs to be reset.

Until its reset, you will continue to be stressed and reactive.

If allowed to continue, this situation can and will create more problems than need to be there.

The solution is inside you

The subconscious is so adaptable that you can use it to tell you what it needs via the nervous system. By using the systems connected to the Nervous System we have been able to find ways of associating new and better options to what your subconscious thinks it knows. Adding new information into the subconscious this way means you have control over what you rewrite and the process of how you do it ensures the subconscious sees it as important as the old ‘Code’.

That means you can reset the code and even better, rewrite its content so that no further stress reactions take place unless your life really is threatened.

By doing this, your brain can maintain many of the functions that would otherwise be turned off and use them to create new options to what before seemed like an impossible situation. These parts of the brain are needed to input new information into the Survival Code to eliminate unnecessary information that has found its way into the Code.

It’s like being able to do a spring clean of the subconscious so it can focus on what you want rather than on what you don’t want.

Enjoy.

Andrew Verity

PS. Watch for solutions to retraining your Nervous System in Stress Relief Strategies Revealed book from Neuro-Training.com